Second, what's the effect of adding or removing time once the roast has begun? Once the roast is underway, how does changing the total roasting time affect the transitions between the power steps of the profile?

I find the most important part of the manual to be in the 'Tips' section.

Here's one:

Know your beans. Hard Bean (SHB - strictly hard bean or HG- high grown) vs. Soft Bean is based on the altitude at which beans are grown. Bean suppliers often post data about grades, such as SHB, HG, etc. when describing the bean characteristics.A few examples of standard Profiles for types of bean are:P1-2: All Centrals, Peruvian and ColombiansP3: Brazilians, Africans, Southeast Asians, Malabar*, Jamaican Blue Mountain and Yauco Selecto(Puerto Rican)P4-5: Kona and other low grown island coffees (P4 just into 2nd crack, and P5 for shy of 2nd crack)

Due to types of processing, aged and Decaffeinated Coffees roast quicker and remind users, as discussed earlier, to never gauge a degree of roast by the appearance of oils or non appearance of oils.

Here's another:

Key Tip – ‘Rosetta Stone’: To better anticipate a roast hitting 2nd crack and for additional roast control use the following time guides.Adjust times as close to the following using the + or - buttons once you hear the first cracking sound of 1C. This allows you to more accurately control and understand where you are in a roast, especially in cases where you have a bean type that migrates from 1C to 2C seamlessly. This also helps to prevent you from over-roasting your beans.

1&#8260;4 lb - 1:30 minutes

1&#8260;2 lb - 2:10 minutes

1 lb – 3:10 minutesThe times shown are approximately the time it takes from start of the very first snaps of 1st crack (1C) to the start of 2nd crack (2C) for regular coffee. Decaf and aged coffees, such as Malabar, roast faster and get darker more quickly

I just roasted 10 oz of Nicaraguan beans. According to Tip #5, I used P1 (for all centrals) I set it at 1 lb, P1, B.

Sweet Maria's recommended FC, so I used Tip #3 and went-to-cool at 2:30 min after the first or second 'snap' of the 1CR. The roast was perfect. I could have used P1, A (I would have had enough time) and if not, I could have added a + or a ++ to extend P1 by a minute or two.

I think the recommendation of breaking out a Kill-A-Watt is a great idea... I have one around somewhere. That and a stopwatch would tell me what I need to know.

I'm not sure it's going to matter very much in practice, because the line voltage in my current apartment is feeble and I pretty much need to roast 300g batches every other day to stay on top of our household consumption... so to scrape 2nd crack for espresso roasts with these loads, I have to push P1 right out near the maximum allowed by the nanny.

But hey, who can resist playing with a toy? On the weekends I want to crank out some 150g batches & see what differences I can squeeze from the beans. First I'd like to time onset of 1st crack for a certain bean, then try to shape P2 such that the temp drops right after that & delays the onset of 2nd crack for substantially longer than contemplated by the "Rosetta Stone" in the product manual.

Thanks again for the pointers - I'm really enjoying the machine, the coffee, and the community here.

If you have a PC and ae willing to install some software, www.roasterthing.com , has all the Behmor profiles built in and you can watch them change as you play with the buttons on the simulated control panel.

But, and this is a big but, the profiles only control the maximum heater on time percent and have no relation to bean temp. Man it's maximum on time percent because there is also a thermostat that turns off the heater when it reaches an internal limit.

OTOH, if you have an iPad or iPhone you could go to the App Store and look for Roastmaster by Rainfrog. Look here.

As well as keeping records, following your roasting process and minding your inventory it also will place the profile on top of the process chart, with the X-Axis in units of time (not percentages as it is in the Behmor manual). Also it runs simultaneous stop-watches for run-time, 1CR and 2CR.

The App Roastmaster has greatly improved my use of the Behmor Roaster.

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